Hot Topics:

Decade after founding, Wikileaks alienates friends

Sentinel & Enterprise

Updated:
07/31/2016 06:32:27 AM EDT

By Joshua Brustein

Bloomberg

It has been 10 years since Julian Assange founded Wikileaks, the website that has gone on to serve as the world's most prominent digital repository of leaked government information. The organization has been celebrating a decade of existence over the last week by putting on display everything that makes its brand of radical transparency so powerful and problematic:

* On Sunday, Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped down from her position as chair of the Democratic National Committee because Wikileaks obtained and published a trove of embarrassing emails from the organization.

* On Monday, an academic named Zeynep Tufekci wrote a scathing article about another recent Wikileaks data dump, which included 300,000 emails related to the Turkish government. In the article-entitled "Wikileaks Puts Women in Turkey in Danger, for No Reason"-Tufekci argued that there was nothing newsworthy about the emails, but that Wikileaks had exposed massive databases containing private information about nearly every woman in the country.

* On Tuesday, American intelligence officials said that the Russian government was almost certainly responsible for the DNC hack, and the New York Times reported that Assange timed the release of the leak to maximize the political damage to Hillary Clinton.

* On Wednesday, Wikileaks released more information obtained from the DNC, this time a series of voicemails.

Advertisement

* On Thursday, Edward Snowden, who exposed the National Security Agency's surveillance program and a natural ally to Wikileaks if there's ever been one, criticized the organization for its insistence on releasing all information it receives in completely raw form. "Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped," Snowden tweeted. "But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake."

Wikileaks, never one to pull a punch, went on the offensive. In its view, the Democrats were corrupt, Tufekci was a shill for Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the New York Times's story was "entirely false," and Snowden was maneuvering for a pardon from a future Clinton administration.

WikiLeaks prominence grew from the ability to accept and display leaked information online without either exposing its sources's identities or succumbing to attempts by governments to censor its output.

The organization has been less sophisticated in figuring out what to do with this kind of information. There is a long-running tension between the positive impact of exposing things that powerful organizations want to keep secret, and the negative implications of making private personal data public. Wikileaks occupies the extreme end of this debate. The answer, in its eyes, is simple: the more the better.

Even people who see Wikileaks's broader mission -- "We Open Governments" -- as admirable have long criticized the group as reckless.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the government secrecy project at the Federation of American Scientists, said in 2010 that the view of Wikileaks as a champion of free speech was misguided. "The criticism of Wikileaks has been amply borne out since then," he said. "Fortunately more people now see the organization for what it is." Wikileaks didn't respond to an interview request.

Even natural allies of Wikileaks say it's hurting their cause. They say Wikileaks disregard for legitimate privacy concerns could have broader consequences for other advocates pushing for government transparency because it provides their political opponents with a boogeyman. Tufekci wrote that the Erdogan government has already stepped up its censorship campaign in Turkey.

Critics of Wikileaks say that Russian intelligence has "weaponized" the organization with the DNC hack, essentially drawing attention to documents by leveraging Wikileaks's brand as a place for juicy documents.

The perception is likely to lessen the organization's impact over time, argues Paul Rosenzweig, a cybersecurity consultant who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. "It's the difference between setting yourself up to take information from whistleblowers who may have a legitimate grievance, and making yourself an outlet for spies," he said. Radical transparency loses its appeal once it becomes a tool for governments to use against one another.

Welcome to your discussion forum: Sign in with a Disqus account or your social networking account for your comment to be posted immediately, provided it meets the guidelines. (READ HOW.)
Comments made here are the sole responsibility of the person posting them; these comments do not reflect the opinion of The Sentinel and Enterprise. So keep it civil.